Branch's living documentation system propels enterprise growth

Branch helps companies measure the performance of the links they use across channels on mobile — from emails to ads. As its engineering team manages an increasingly complex system, their documentation in Notion keeps them aligned.

Insights from

Dmitri Gaskin

Co-founder

Use cases

Notes, Documentation, Project management

A single roadmap for all engineering teams

Branch's engineering team is divided into sub-teams, each simultaneously working on dozens of high-impact projects. In Notion, they share one unified roadmap so all teams have visibility and can track toward the same goals. Team leads gather each week to go through this roadmap, where they can shuffle projects based on changing priorities or unforeseen blockers. All the important information — what's up next, who's doing what — is crystal clear for everyone.

Branch can create customized views so teams can focus on just their projects.

Keeping everything in Notion means the team only has to learn one tool, instead of bouncing between different tools with different interfaces.

Dmitri Gaskin — Keeping everything in Notion means the team only has to learn one tool, instead of bouncing between different tools with different interfaces.

Customizable views for flexible planning

As the engineering org grew — with more sub-teams, more projects, more complexity — Branch's roadmap needed to be flexible enough to accommodate expanding needs. That's why they created custom views of their existing roadmap in Notion, each filtered by properties like sub-team, sprint, milestone and more.

"If we weren't using Notion, we'd have to look at fragmented roadmaps by team. With the ability to filter this roadmap by any attribute, we can plan in whatever way makes sense for us," says Dmitri.

Having the same set of data sliced many ways helps Branch's engineering leads forecast the hours a project might need, or which engineer has the bandwidth for it. And as new projects get added, custom views help everyone see what's on each team's plate and adjust accordingly.

Branch filter — Filters give Branch flexibility when planning engineering work across teams.

Blueprints all engineers reference as they build

Branch's product is complex. Engineers need to understand multiple layers of information in order to make changes. In Notion, the team writes and maintains all product documentation so that anyone can search the exact information they need for a project. With one complete source of truth, engineers don't waste precious time reverse-engineering how the product works or operate off of faulty assumptions. Every new feature is added to this documentation to keep it up to date.

Code blocks and diagrams can be easily added alongside text to create multi-media documentation.

Having clear, searchable documentation in Notion saves everyone a lot of time and prevents a lot of mistakes. We know exactly what was put in place, why, and how it's evolved over time.

A system that makes documentation fun to write

Before Notion, Branch's documents were scattered across Google Docs, Confluence, and Jira. People didn't know where to find information or where to write it — so no one wanted to write anything at all. Now all proposals, specs, and guidelines are in one place.

"People actually enjoy writing documentation in Notion. 50% of our documentation was newly created because people are motivated to do it. The whole team is more productive because the information we're looking for is easier to access, and that information is more thorough," says Dmitri.

Instead of a stale, read-only experience, Notion helps everyone contribute to the company's documentation and keep it up to date. The result? This gives Branch a detailed history of major decisions and a foundation on which to continue building the product and the team.